The Web’s new taxonomy:Corporate communicators adapt commercial sites

That’s changing. By adding tags to content—your own or anybody else’s—users are taking control of the Web’s lexicon. The implications for business communications will be significant, and it’s mostly all upside.

Tag—your hit!

A tag is nothing more than a label, a word or phrase you use to describe something, applied to online content and compliant with various standards that expose them to Web search utilities. But it’s not the technology underlying tags that make them exciting; it’s the fact that the users, not the content producer, apply them. When everybody is tagging content, and those tags are accessible, then the users of the Web are essentially negotiating a language (as InfoWorld columnist Jon Udell put it).

That changes the way your content will be found—and it could even lead you to change the kind of content you produce for the Web and where you store it.